It’s a message that’s playing well with Trump’s base — nearly a third of voters say they view China as “the enemy” — and is reminiscent of the hard-line, anti-immigrant positions that helped catapult him to the White House in 2016.

But it’s unclear if ratcheting up the pressure on China will prove to be a winning campaign strategy with the broader electorate amid sagging poll numbers and daily news reports detailing Trump’s slow and shaky response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump praised China’s coronavirus response more than 30 times between January and March as the virus began spreading around the world, according to a CNN tally.

But that relationship quickly soured once the death toll and jobless rate began to soar. The coronavirus has now claimed more than 95,000 lives and infected nearly 1.6 million people in the U.S.; close to 40 million people in the U.S. are now unemployed.

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In recent days, Trump has lashed out on Twitter that the “incompetence of China” led to “mass Worldwide killing.” He even floated the idea that a laboratory in Wuhan, China, where the first outbreak was reported, had accidentally unleashed the virus — an unsubstantiated theory that some of his own top medical experts have dismissed.

The president has also threatened economic retaliation against Beijing and the withdrawal of U.S. funding to the World Health Organization, which Trump and his allies see as complicit in failing to warn the international community about the pandemic.

Biden swung back at Trump with an anti-China ad of his own, arguing that Trump “rolled over for the Chinese” and “let in 40,000 from China into America” during the pandemic. Asian American groups, typically aligned with Biden, condemned the ad as racist for failing to distinguish between Chinese people and the Chinese communist government.

In recent days, congressional Republicans have been repeating this refrain — the United States is engaged in a new “cold war” with China — in a bid to rally Americans behind the president.

“They’re in for world domination. … Understand you have an enemy. They’re an adversary. It’s called communist China,” Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “They intentionally didn’t tell us about the coronavirus. It was intentional. … You can see it was intentional.”

While Democrats launched a bipartisan committee to oversee trillions of dollars in coronavirus relief aid, they have rebuffed invitations to join the GOP’s China panel. That’s given Republican leaders an opening.

The GOP’s China-bashing comes as a growing number of Americans view the global economic powerhouse as a hostile threat to the U.S. Thirty-one percent of Americans said China is “the enemy,” up 11 percentage points since January, according to a Politico-Morning Consult poll. Only 23 percent of Americans see China as an ally or friend, down 9 points during that same period.

“The president’s campaign will do everything possible to make it about China, immigration, and Joe Biden’s shortcomings,” Curbelo said, “but that is unlikely to change the fundamental nature of a contest featuring a controversial incumbent.”

Indeed, recent polls have shown Trump’s approval numbers are sliding, particularly when it comes to his handling of the deadly pandemic. A Fox News poll sounded alarm bells in the Trump campaign by showing that 46 percent of voters said they trusted Biden to handle the pandemic, compared with 37 percent who trusted Trump. Asked who they would vote for today, 48 percent said Biden, while 40 percent said Trump.

Pelosi and other Democratic leaders are also seizing on a new study by Columbia University that says Trump’s initial reluctance to take COVID-19 seriously cost tens of thousands of lives.

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As for the GOP’s anti-China rhetoric, Democrats say it is outright “racist,” arguing that Trump is only trying to distract voters from his own failure to avert a health and economic crisis under his watch.

“He squandered six or more weeks of valuable time that he should have been preparing,” Cicilline added. “This is part of a pattern where the president is trying to assign responsibility to somebody, some organization, some person, some country, to really distract from his own failures.”